God's Odd Benedictions, II: The Sad

Kenilworth Union Church

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God's Odd Benedictions, II: The Sad

Lent

February 18, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 5:1–4

Said one Jewish scholar, “It is frustration and sorrow that are our passports to fellowship and sympathy. Life teaches us at every turn how insufferable are those who have never suffered.”[1] Yes? Have you experienced the insufferability of the unsuffering: the frozen face, the unmoved affect, the narcotic numbness of the unsuffering?

When Katie Lancaster and Melanie Flynn train our Stephen Ministers, they know that one of the greatest obstacles they have to overcome is a stubborn lack of self-confidence. “I can’t do this,” they think. “I didn’t go to seminary. I don’t have the skills.”

[1]Slightly adapted from Robert Gordis, Book of God and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 114.

The Practice of Living with Purpose: Vocation

May 19, 2024 • Christine V. Hides

What's Been Saving Your Life? VI: The Practice of Walking on the Earth: Groundedness

May 12, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Exodus 3:1–12

This message might have just as easily been received elsewhere. Maybe Moses didn’t have to go into the wilderness to hear, to see, to take off his shoes, and receive what was holy. Maybe he didn’t have to go beyond the mountains with a herd of sheep, into a wilderness beyond the wilderness in order to meet God. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the one who numbered the stars. The one who ordered the planets. The one spoke the words “let there be light” and there was light. This is not a God of the margins, but of the center, a God about whom this whole story is written. But Moses isn’t paying attention. And it takes a burning bush to turn him toward God.

What's Saving Your Life Right Now? V: The Practice of Paying Attention : Reverence

May 5, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Revelation 4

We know that reverence is one of the things that is saving our lives right now. We know what makes us flourish. We know what’s good for us. We know what we need, because every day as we scroll through our media, we encounter a swollen, grotesque, vainglorious ego scowling out at us from the screen, reverencing nothing and respecting no one, and we know instinctively that that is exactly what we don’t want to be. It’s ironic: to live large, to live up to the towering stature of our full humanity, we remind ourselves now and then that we are in fact small, contingent, unnecessary creatures, living only by the grace of that Crafty Wizard who threw a hundred billion galaxies across vast eons of emptiness. And so now and then we pause from our daily round to hear something like George Frideric Handel’s "Dettingen Te Deum", a staggering paeon to the matchless majesty of God Godself, the “luminous deep being a lofty light,” as Dante puts.#_ftn1 #_ftnref1Dante Alighieri, Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, ll. 115ff.